Garden State

For a directorial debut, Zach Braff's Garden State is pretty darn good. It's a little precious at times, and takes a good twenty minutes to really get its footing, but after that it's quite good. Braff is good in the starring role, but is outacted by Peter Sarsgaard and Natalie Portman. A lot has been made of the soundtrack, but fairly so, it's really good. Sure, it's a lot of kind of hip/formerly trendy stuff, like The Shins and Coldplay, etc., but it fits. I mean, it's a movie about New Jersey, a place well known for co-opting the formerly trendy from NYC a little bit late.

I also expected Garden State to be more depressing than it actually was. Often I have the opposite experience at the movies, so it was nice for it to be a little less desolate than I expected.

There were also great previews: Vanity Fair, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Neverland (or Before Neverland or what ever the Barrie biopic is being called now), all of which look quite good.